Rolling, rolling, rolling, Longhorn

03/01/2004

Longhorn roundup
Longhorn, like many things in the history of Microsoft, is "long-awaited." A
release date has not been announced yet, but it is still not too early to begin
thinking seriously about Longhorn

The long and short of Longhorn
Its feature set is far from finalized, but Longhorn is expected to deliver stronger OS "fundamentals" (the so-called Base OS Services), an overhauled presentation layer, radical enhancements to the file system and major new features based on Web services. Simon Yates, senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, summarizes some of the key changes here.

Gates: Longhorn biggest thing since Windows 95
"This is going to be a very big release -- the biggest release of this decade, the biggest since Windows 95," Bill Gates said of Longhorn. "We’re tackling three different areas: the fundamentals -- that means the security, the auto-installation, applications not interfering with each other. There’s a lot in the fundamental area."

Indigo: The end of the rainbow
When it finally ships, the Longhorn release of Windows will include a number of interesting new technologies. But it is the technology currently code-named “Indigo” that stands out as the most important product for anyone who cares about how diverse systems are glued together.

Mood Indigo: A boost to programmer productivity?
Indigo, the Web services subsystem that will be built into Longhorn, the next release of Windows, offers developers several advantages; but the key one is productivity, contends Steven VanRoekel, director of Web services at Microsoft.